Perception最新文献

The aim of this study was to contribute to our understanding of embodied art experiences. We were interested in the emerging relationship between artwork, on the one hand, and one's bodily movements and associated embodied affective states on the other. Concretely, postural control of 46 participants looking at a diverse set of 21 20th-century abstract paintings was analysed. Also, we explored the relation between postural control, emotional states of being moved and aesthetic appraisal. Results did not reveal differences in postural control between the paintings. However, differences in variability, dynamic stability, complexity and intermittency of postural sway were found, when comparing subsets of high-motion and low-motion paintings and between subclasses of abstract painting styles. Emotional states of being moved and aesthetic appraisal were associated with postural control, both across paintings and across people in several ways. Together these findings provide empirical evidence for an embodied art experience.

This study examined whether preterm infants possess a predisposition to follow face-like patterns and investigated the potential consequences of limited visual exposure to faces during the first weeks of life in preterm infants who experienced temporary visual deprivation due to phototherapy. The orienting responses (i.e., eyes and head movements toward two types of stimuli [face-like vs. scrambled]) of preterm infants were compared using a visual tracking paradigm. They were divided into two groups: preterm infants who underwent phototherapy for hyperbilirubinemia (experimental group) were compared with those who did not receive phototherapy and had no hyperbilirubinemia (control group). Both groups were assessed at 7 and 14 days of life (i.e., before and after phototherapy for the experimental group). Results demonstrated that both groups presented a preference for face-like stimuli at 7 days of life, which decreased in the experimental group at 14 days. This decrease may be due to the lack of visual experience with faces from wearing safety glasses during phototherapy. The findings supported theoretical views on how visual experiences mediate changes in face preferences.

Perceptual learning is a process of developing the skill to differentiate previously undifferentiated information. In this study participants learned to identify novel objects (feelies). To test the role of visual exploration, objects were viewed from either a side or a top view and displayed as either static pictures or rotating about a vertical axis, with moving objects facilitating more visual exploration. In Experiment 1, a simple object discrimination task was used. Participants reached perfect accuracy sooner in static conditions than in motion conditions, regardless of viewpoint, suggesting that although movement may have promoted greater exploratory activity, the information provided by movement did not influence object shape discrimination. Experiment 2 investigated if a functionally relevant task would necessitate the use of greater exploratory activity for perceptual learning. Participants were required to either (1) think of potential uses for the feelies, (2) think of a predetermined use, or (3) describe the object's physical appearance. Visual exploration of objects benefited learning most in the condition in which observers generated potential uses for objects themselves. The affordance prime promoted functionally relevant learning. The most efficient pattern of learning was observed when participants generated uses for moving objects viewed from the side. These findings suggest that exploratory activity facilitates perceptual learning of affordances.

Most familiar odours are complex mixtures of volatile molecules, which the olfactory system synthesizes into a perceptual whole. However, odours are rarely encountered in isolation and thus, the brain must also separate distinct odour objects from complex backgrounds. While in vision, individual differences in scene analysis have been widely reported, to date, little attention has been paid to the cognitive processes underlying this olfactory ability. The aim of the present study was to determine whether local processing performance in visual tasks predicts participants' ability to identify component odours in multicomponent mixtures. Fifty-nine participants (F = 39), aged 16-55, completed two visual perception tasks, (Navon and Block Design), an odour-mixture task designed to test participants' ability to identify multi-component odour objects in binary/ternary mixtures and the Autism Quotient (AQ) Questionnaire, which measures autistic traits in the general population. While performance indices on neither visual task, nor scores on the AQ, were associated with odour mixture task performance, there was moderate evidence to support an association between reaction time on the Navon task and binary odour mixture task performance. These results provide insight into the cognitive processes underpinning olfactory scene analysis and support previous reports that faster processing speed is associated with superior selective attention.

Visual perception of biological motion (BM) is essential in comprehending our environment. Despite the well-established contribution of cross-modal priming to our understanding of BM perception, the influence of expectations in audiovisual settings remains unexplored. The present study investigates the impact of congruent and incongruent auditory cues on detecting BMs presented in point-light displays, exploring the impact of predictive processing on BM perception in the audiovisual context. Participants viewed either congruent auditory priors, which gave the correct information about the BM, or incongruent priors. They were required to detect the BMs as fast and accurately as possible. Our findings revealed shorter reaction times in congruent trials than incongruent ones although accuracy remained unaffected by congruency. Overall, our results highlight that while prior information can facilitate faster detection of human motion, it does not necessarily enhance accuracy.

There are several studies that compare perception for written words and faces. However, many draw conclusions from different experimental paradigms, complicating direct comparison between these stimuli. Such comparisons are of interest because of hypotheses based on neuroimaging and neuropsychological data that face and word processing may have common underlying mechanisms and neural substrates. To facilitate such comparisons, we created a novel paradigm studying face recognition that closely resembles the word-superiority test, in which a letter is more easily identified when it is embedded in a whole word than when seen in isolation or in an unpronounceable random string of letters. Forty subjects each completed both of our tests. In the traditional word-superiority test, they briefly saw a word, a pseudoword, or a nonword, then a single test letter, and were asked if the letter had been part of the initial stimulus. In the face-superiority test, they briefly saw a learned, new, or scrambled face initially, then a test facial feature in isolation, and were asked to respond whether the feature had been part of the initial stimulus. For both categories of stimuli, there were similar differences between real, pseudo-, and non-stimuli. Accuracy was lower for non-stimuli compared to pseudo- and real stimuli, which in turn did not differ from each other. Response latency was greater for non-stimuli compared to pseudo-stimuli, which in turn was greater than real stimuli. Bivariate analyses revealed significant correlations between interstimulus trials for reaction times. Our study replicated a face superiority effect utilizing a similar methodology to the word-superiority test. Additionally, response latencies follows similar patterns in the recognition of written words and faces.

Faces are important communicative signals in humans and face perception is believed to involve specialised mechanisms in the visual system. Several other categories of stimuli are also thought to involve specialised processes, including bodies, letters, places, and food. A recently described face size illusion shows that upright faces appear physically smaller than identical inverted faces. This illusion appears to be highly face-specific, not occurring for other stimulus categories, such as bodies, letters, and hands. In this study, we investigated whether an analogous size inversion illusion occurs for items of food, a category which has recently been found to also involve specialised processes in the visual system. The results provided a clear replication of the face size illusion, with upright faces seen as smaller than inverted faces. In contrast, items of food and everyday objects showed an effect in the opposite direction, appearing larger when upright than when inverted. These results provide further evidence for the highly face-selective nature of the face size illusion. They also provide evidence for a different size illusion which affects visual perception of food.

One of the most remarkable human cognitive abilities is the "sense of number," that is, the almost instantaneous perception of numerosity information in the visual environment. While numerosity perception mirrors primary sensory processing in many aspects, little is known whether and how numerosity perception is influenced by selective attention to numerosity. Here, we investigated the effects of feature-based attention on numerosity perception using the visual search paradigm and the adaptation paradigm, respectively. In the visual search experiment, participants identified the presence of a numerosity-defined outlier among an array of distractors, while in the numerosity adaptation experiment, participants attended to a random dot field whose numerosity either matched or differed from the adaptor. We found a "semiparallel" search pattern in which attention was captured by the numerosity-defined outliers in a time-consuming, rather than an instantaneous manner. Interestingly, reduced numerosity adaptation aftereffects were observed when the attended numerosity matched the numerosity of the adaptor, indicating weakened perceptual representation of numerosity induced by feature-based attention. Our findings show, for the first time, that numerosity serves as a unique unit of nonspatial feature-based attention and that numerosity perception was modulated by feature-based attention via a distinctive mechanism that differed from other primary visual features.

Time perception is influenced by the spatial factors of visual stimuli. When observing a moving visual stimulus, a longer moving distance is judged to be longer than a shorter moving distance, even if the moving time is the same (the kappa effect). In the present study, to examine the effect of retrospective attention on the kappa effect, two visual stimuli with different moving distances were presented simultaneously. Immediately after these stimuli disappeared, the stimulus to which attention should be directed was specified. Participants judged the time interval to be longer when the stimulus to which they directed retrospective attention moved a longer distance than when it moved a shorter one. This finding indicates that stimulus features (distance moved) affect time perception by directing attention to a specific object in the memory after the disappearance of visual stimuli.

Psychological studies have revealed that people can easily draw inferences regarding others' personal traits from their faces, which has a considerable impact on social decisions. Impressions from faces can be summarized into two orthogonal dimensions: valence and dominance. Owing to their prominence in social relationships, faces appear in paintings across all ages and cultures. These observations lead to the question of whether the structure of trait impressions from illustrated portraits is similar to that of real faces. To examine this issue, we collected trait ratings of illustrated portraits of historical individuals from old Japanese artwork. In the Study 1 section, we applied a principal component analysis to 13 traits by Japanese raters and observed two orthogonal dimensions consistent with the valence and dominance model; the first component was correlated with trustworthiness but not with dominance, while the second component was correlated with dominance but not with trustworthiness. In the Study 2 section, we collected the trait ratings of real faces by Japanese raters and directly assessed the similarity between the two components. Highly similar structures were observed for the illustrated and real faces. Our findings provide evidence that portraits of historical individuals were painted to convey distinctive impressions of trustworthiness and dominance. This suggests that these traits were fundamental dimensions of people's perception in medieval Japan similar to today's society.